The constant SXSW marketing is most obvious at the interactive conference, but it extends to the music and film portions, too. The smaller bands are here to score record deals. The indie filmmakers are here to sign distribution deals. The big bands here are half hidden under the coattails of their sponsors: Passion Pit, brought to you by Taco Bell. When Jay-Z was here last year, you had to have an American Express card to attend the show. SXSW is the 21st-century equivalent of a medieval market town, just with more horseshit. Its an orgy of capitalism, an unrestrained, unselfconscious celebration of sales, marketing, branding, and gamification. Even the dumbest of memes have been recruited in the service of sales. Grumpy Cat is here, and she wants you to buy Friskies. For a gathering so driven by the pursuit of money, the question of who has it—and who doesnt—goes almost completely unmentioned. There are talks about social and civil rights issues—feminism, race, female genital cutting—but words like inequality literally arent on the schedule. (A search for taxes returns a session that mentions how awesome it would be to have a robot who could do them.) Maybe thats because everyone knows that almost everyone here coughed up several hundreds of dollars for a conference pass, and hundreds more for lodging. Conversations about inequality are awkward. Conversations about futurism, tech triumphalism, entrepreneurship, and the intersections thereof reign supreme. Theres almost no talk of religion, electoral politics, or labor unions—anything that smacks of old-school collective action. This is a place of unfettered technological optimism, where coders and entrepreneurs can solve any societal problem. SXSW has a politics, but its one that mirrors the technolibertarianism of the Reddit generation: civil liberties (read: free speech, Larry Lessig, and Aaron Swartz), entrepreneurship, and individualism. motherjones/media/2013/03/south-buy-southwest-sxsw-marketing
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:08:50 +0000
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